Issue n. 8 (2025): 1945. Close Encounters Between War and Peace

For millions of people across the globe, 1945 was a watershed. Hitler’s suicide on 30th April and the fall of Berlin in early May heralded the German unconditional surrender. But in Asia and the Pacific, the fighting continued as Allied armies and navies continued their campaign to dislodge and defeat the entrenched forces of Imperial Japan. The two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August – acts which remain controversial and much debated – likewise caused enormous death and devastation, but they also accelerated Japan’s surrender and the end of the hostilities globally.

Even as the final Allied victory approached, however, new challenges emerged. In February 1945, at Yalta in Crimea, the “Big Three” – Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin – outlined plans for the division of Germany, for the payment of reparations, and for Soviet participation in the war on the Pacific Front. And in July, the Potsdam Conference saw the hardening of tensions among and between the Allies so that by 1946, the early outlines of what would become a Cold War between East and West had already started to emerge.

Understandably, given its geographic reach, human cost, and profound geopolitical consequences, the Second World War has bequeathed a monumental historiography, one which has reflected the political and cultural divisions between the belligerents, and which has also highlighted the troubled and divided memories that exist within participant nations. By the 1980s, though, diplomatic histories had also been joined (and, at times, contested) by numerous more tightly focused studies, many of which revealed the invigorating impact of ideas and methods drawn from social history (which had first emerged as a distinct field of scholarly enquiry in the 1970s). Indeed, the final three decades of the twentieth century saw our understanding of the Second World War greatly enriched by new works examining such crucial issues as life on the home front, the socio-economic dynamics of total mobilization, the origins of the Nazi’s “final solution”, and the role played in the conflict by culture, communication, and, especially, propaganda.

As the war’s fiftieth anniversary approached, moreover, yet another historiographical shift, often referred to as the “cultural turn”, had further diversified the field. But perhaps the most significant developments were centred around investigations into the war’s memory and legacy, with a plethora of powerful works focused on this subject emerging in the decade either side of the new millennium. Among this scholarship were several volumes that examined how the conflict has been commemorated in diverse national cultures as well as others that have turned attention to how the war has been depicted in film, fiction, and popular culture.

Issue n.8, edited with the collaboration of Dr Sam Edwards, is informed by these various scholarly developments, particularly those of the last decade, which have emphasised the complex and contested human experience of the Second World War. It does so by centring events, experiences, and encounters rooted in 1945, the consequences and echoes of which, though, resonated through the years, affecting the political, social, and cultural imagination.